Oak Street Historical Society Signage

When Route 34 was built through the heart of New Haven in the late 1950s, it meant the displacement of the Oak Street neighborhood.  In 2016, YSOA students Maddy Sembler, Justin Leonard, Jason Kurzweil, and Matthew Zuckerman formed an Oak Street Historical Society to create a “historical wayfinding system,” retrieving quotations from the New Haven Redevelopment Agency archives and other sources that were used in the discourse of Urban Renewal and printing them on corrugated plastic signs. 

Signs were installed around the Oak Street Connector that was then (and still today) in the midst of yet another dramatic redevelopment:  this time, new air-rights building parcels have been created above the highway and local streets have been extended across what was once a major divider in the city.  This informal historical society also creatd a pamphlet that was available at the New Haven Info Kiosk at the corner of Chapel and College Streets (the Kiosk has since been removed).